The sortie that I have planned for today is three times the length of any previous excursion. That’s a good thing. I need to get fit. Some of the trips that I have planned in the near future will be very long.

The GPS device has been loaded with a fresh set of batteries and carefully taped onto my bike. My rucksack is packed with a package of nuts, two apples, a spare inner tube, levers to get the tire off if necessary, my compact digital camera and a medium format range finder plus plenty of film. Also a bottle of water.

I leave home quickly. On the road and traffic is flowing around me effortlessly. My path today will take me down through Wandsworth, a traffic nightmare at almost any time during the week. Cars crawl up the A3 to get out of London – in a feeble attempt at escaping the city. If you are biking you don’t really care about traffic jams, as they enable you to slalom your way through their ‘standstillness’.

As I get closer to the first destination of the day snow starts to fall while the sun is shining straight at me, a weird sensation that doesn’t last more than a couple of minutes. The waypoint is up the hill from Wandsworth. It’s named ill75 and located on a small side street. It is a beautiful day, and the never-ending stream of aircrafts destined for London Heathrow are flying right over my head. Nice.

The next waypoint spells trouble, as it’s located in the middle of a school’s outdoor sport field (fenced with barbwire, someone might steal their football goal). Two teams, one wearing bright green and another yellow, are playing football. I can’t tell who’s winning. I get as close as I can to the waypoint and take my picture.

My next destination brings me up to the Thames and as I cycle slowly along the waterfront teams of kayak rowers are readying for a race. A motorboat is moving along side them, monitoring their every move. It looks quite exciting. I continue along and across the river, and find myself in Putney. This waypoint is on a private estate. Big signs are warning everyone not to trespass into private property. The streets are littered with private security people – or so I think. I cycle in, but halfway there I get cold feet and head back out. I take my picture close by next to a railway bridge. The opportunity is used to enjoy the scenery and eat the apple that I brought with me. Sitting there quietly for a moment it occurs to me that many of the waypoints I will be visiting in the near future will probably be inaccessible. What to do? Maybe I should make a couple of rules:

1: Never trespass into private property.
2: Get as close as I can on my bike.
3: The success radius of any waypoint is the wingspan of the world’s biggest aircraft, 290 feet.

From hereon I continue uptown and find the third waypoint in the heart of Chelsea. The final waypoint of the day takes me to Kensington Park where my GPS device is finally given a chance to show of it’s remarkable precision. It achieves almost perfect reception and I get the accuracy down to 6 feet. Very, very good. I rest there for a couple of minutes in the shadow of a tree while watching a Virgin Atlantic Airbus A340-600 bank smoothly to the right as it makes its way across south London towards Heathrow.